The Lexington Herald-Leader ran a front-page story on June 5 dealing with the fact that two of the 15 Urban-County Council members had spent 40 percent of the Council’s total expenditure for travel in the last five or so years. Both of them have already overspent their council budgets for this fiscal year (ending June 30) by $3,200 (Brown by more than $3,700), and both have trips planned for this month. Councilman George Brown will make trips to Orlando and Denver in June, never mind the overspending, while colleague Jacques Wigginton will head for Orlando, a fun place if ever there was one. If the trips over the last 5.5 years third-in-line councilman David Stevens has taken are added to the mix, the three men, representing 20 percent of the council members, have spent more than 50 percent of the total travel expenses.
Why do Wigginton and Brown do this? Simple…because they can. By the end of June, Brown will have averaged one trip a month representing the city-county in 2005. One wonders just how much representation the city needs. According to the H-L, Brown has taken more than 37 trips since January 2000, while Wigginton has hit the road more than 30 times since January 2001. Again, one wonders just how much representation the city needs from just two of its councilpersons. The real kicker, however, lies in the fact that these two officials went to the same conference (or whatever the clambake du jour was) 22 times. Is Lexington so big and its population so humongous that the city can’t make it on just one representative per outing? Or…could it be that these officials were sort of just representing themselves? Well, both of them plan to be in Orlando this month. One wonders further what financial distress might be engendered if all 15 of the councilpersons decided to hit the road as often as Brown and Wigginton. After all, there are all kinds of clambakes out there just waiting for elected officials to do the per diem number on their cities.
One also wonders why the respective entities sponsoring all these conferences don’t have budgets of their own, perhaps funded by cities, corporations, civic organizations and the like. Then, elected officials could be reimbursed by the sponsoring agencies, which could make rules pertaining to who may attend, and conceivably get rid of a lot of dead wood, such as attendees who don’t actually attend most sessions or who represent unnecessary replication, but who do have a swell time.
The irony lies in the fact that Lexington, like most cities, has been strapped for cash in recent years, but is governed by some people who don’t even take their own budgets seriously. There’s no argument with the fact that local officials profit from meeting with officials in similar capacities from all over the country, but the notion that they need to hit the trail as a routine matter is balderdash. The multiplicity of such trips, especially to venues of redundancy, both member-wise and substance-wise, smacks of vacationing far more than doing the city’s business. Whether this happens or not matters little, since it’s the perception of what happens that matters. It’s inconceivable that one councilperson can’t either report his conference-education to the whole body or at least arrange for an aide to do it; or, it’s inconceivable that one councilperson can’t represent the city’s positions at a conference. Paying two or three people to do what one can is being irresponsible.
The city has just cut trash pickup by about half, one result being the consequent ability to pay policepersons and firepersons a more decent salary. It has just suffered through a loss of well over a million dollars in a useless attempt to take over the water company. Although the city has been tagged for millions in court awards to people abused by Ron Berry, a pedophile who ran a city-financed program for many years, it now faces another round of accusers, the cost being no telling what. [Incidentally, the novel “EDDIE et alia” noted in the Links section was triggered primarily because of this circumstance, and is set in Lexington.] The last thing the city needs is more proof of wastefulness and/or incompetence. Wigginton and Brown would do well to cancel the June excursions – if it’s not too late, that is.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
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